Truth, Metaphor, Model

"Nature happens. No one will add to it"

Paul
Valéry

Only the truth of a metaphor may be defined.
This is not to say that truth may be in any sense metaphoric. But
simply that truth is a statement about the distance between metaphor
and reality. Truth is an evaluation of the adequacy of a metaphor to
reality. It would be absurd to think that truth is only that. Truth is
that and nothing else. It cannot be otherwise. It has no other mode of
existence. This because there is no evaluation of the adequacy of
reality to reality, and besides, there is no need for it.

If this distance between metaphor and
reality was ever to be suppressed, then only the "being there" would be left, perfectly
adequate to itself, without any beyond, without any distance, a sort of
absolute present, total chance or absolute necessity maybe, but chance
or necessity, abstracted from this fundamental distance introduced by
the image, the model, cannot be distinguished, and -- so to say -- are
not even happening.

When you look at it closely, the "being there" stands without laws.
This, because any law is an image too. A law describes a behavior, but
the law is not the behavior, it only re-presents a behavior. And there
are no laws in Nature, except the laws that images introduce in it,
which are real, but only as images.
It cannot be drawn out of this situation that Nature is chaos, nor may
it be drawn out of it that Nature is order. Chaos and determinism are 2
variants of the same absence of wits. Because the mind -- when it has
wits -- remembers that chaos and order are still re-presentations,
models, images.
The "being there" as regards itself has no models. It is careless
and senseles. It does not have anything like a precedent and is no
example for anything. As regards what we know about it, Marcel Duchamp
once noted "La mariée [n'est
jamais] mise à nu
[que] par ses célibataires
mêmes"... Magritte made quite the same remark with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". In other
words, we only get knowledge about reality through a movement by which
"this" becomes absent.
"Je dis 'une rose' et
aussitôt se lève l'absente de tous les bouquets" as
Stéphane Mallarmé once stated it.

***

What our senses show us is not reality, but
only what they think of
it. Our senses are not receivers, they are not even actors.
They are
actions; processes. To perceive does not mean to access reality, but
more to act, to build, to construct an image, a map related to this
part of reality that our senses presently have to deal with. The
stimulus-response model certainly has proven to be useful, but it
is
nevertheless a lie. We do not react to external events. Our
perceptive
activity builds these
events. Nothing ever happens to non-living
beings. What is there has no
history, although it has a history for us. For us for whom having a
history has a meaning. We credit the
inanimate with the sort of autonomy we have as living beings, but the
inanimate has no autonomy. We see forms, shapes, patterns in the
world, things with a sort of own destiny comparable to ours, things
with their own properties and reactions where it might be after all
that only a monstruous wave funtion exists

We never really got out of animism. We only
exchanged the "soul of things"
for the "laws of Nature". And
yes, it seems to work better. But we are still going on with the
same old story, along the same old road, casting our point of view as
living beings onto the world and believing so deeply into it that
we always mix up the prey and the shadow -- in other terms, the
sign and the thing -- what we know of the world and what the world
really is, that is to say an enigma until a better suggestion is
proposed.

We never really got out of the monotheist
point of view either. We still persist in thinking that there is
something such as an absolute point of view about the world, a point of
view that would not be the point of view of flesh, a perspective that
would be independent of this condition we are in : the condition of
living beings. We do not see that the concept of perspective only
exists for living beings and that it is a real misuse to extend its
meaning out of its original scope of validity. We stick to the belief
that there is an absolute truth when truth, may only be -- is per definition -- the truth of an
image.

To perceive is to work out a model. That is
to say -- essentially -- an imperfection from which by a sort of
strange trust, we expect a certain degree of faithfulmess (of truth).
Faithfulness to what, then? Not
to reality obviously, since we only know about reality by means of our
sense. But faithfulness to life without any doubts, since as far as we
see, we do not die that often of trusting what our senses tell us. In
this, in this fragile reason, in this risk, stands all the truth of
perception.

***

And out of this we have gained something as
an understanding of the miracle. So, we are no longer surprised, as the
Greeks used to be, that our senses may sometimes be misleading. What is
a real surprise to us now, is that perception is, after all, relatively
stable and this is the basic reason why we are still alive. And well,
being alive, whatever people might say or think about how charming
death may be, being alive is the
fundamental surprise.

However, the "being
there", this "this", that
our senses are talking about, is what we do not see, what we do not
hear, what we do not touch or feel, what our caress never discovers nor
uncovers. This, because perception is poetry, because perception is "to do", "to
make"

We have learned from recent science that
perception builds maps in the brain. But a map is not a location. A map
may be reliable or wrong. On the opposite, a location is absolutely
exact. It has an immediate, total and inevitable exactitude. The
location is not true, it is real.

From the fact that perception builds maps,
it would be erroneous to derive that perception is abstract. First,
perception is real and concrete in its results. The maps that it builds
are real, just as real as what they represent. A map is a code. Items of a code are always
real, and they must be so, since
a code must be perceived and
read. But even in what seems abstract and non-immediately tangible in
perception, which resides in its process, in its movement, perception
belongs to this world : it happens.
Before perception takes place is not the same as after. Perception
emerges, springs up with the same degree of reality as a barrage
crumbles down or as a flake of snow softly lands.

What we said above seems to be a
confirmation of the platonicist vulgate according to which we only see
shadows. However, the same movement shows that this antiphon is
invalidated on a certain point, on a huge detail, which lies in the
word "only". This, because to see
is to produce shadows. And it
appears that the light that produces these shadows does not lie beyond
our reach. This light belongs to this world and this light is us. There is no other light, no other
intellection than this one, this fragile and risky light of living
beings. We are the fire that produces knowledge and there is no
knowldege that is not produced by this uncertain fire of life.

We are now led to reformulate the quite
approximative assertions we initially made. As our senses only provide
images, metaphors and nothing such as an access to actual reality, the
best we can reach is a certain level of consistency between what our
senses let us know and these other images, metaphors, models, which our
representations are made of. The problem is now to make a bit more
explicit what this sort of consistency is made of.